On the day set aside to draw attention to the wage inequality between Latino women and non-Latino/Hispanic white men, the “National Latina Pay Equity Day” (December 8 in the United States), activists show that the wage gap today is even worse than current estimates.

That’s a statement from NBC News that had access to the recently released reports, which show that Latino earnings are lower if calculations aren't limited only to women who work full-time and year-round, as they usually have been.

“Include the women who work seasonal or part-time jobs, and the earnings for equivalent work drop from 57 cents for every dollar earned by non-Hispanic white men to 54 cents, according to two reports released Thursday to mark National Latina Equal Pay Day”.

“It's worse than people think”, Mónica Ramírez told NBC News, founder and president of Justice for Migrant Women, an advocacy group for migrant women and their families.

According to Ramirez, the true reality of millions of working women has not been reflected in calculations of the wage gap by leaving out women who work part-time, seasonal or migrant jobs.

“We have to understand when we only tell a best-case scenario, which is a bad scenario, we are effectively erasing major groups of people who are most in need of the kinds of policy changes that we are pushing for”, Ramírez said.

Latina Equal Pay Day attempts to spotlight the average additional months and days Latinas have to work to be paid what a white non-Hispanic male worker makes in one year for the same kind of work. For Latinas, it takes an average of 24 months to equal what white, non-Hispanic males are paid in 12 months.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 made it illegal for employers to pay unequal wages to men and women who did substantially equal work.

According to the Justice for Women report, non-Hispanic white men working full and part time on average earn $50,624 per year, while Latinas working full and part time average $25,312. Latinas born outside the U.S. take home an average $23,287 a year, the reports state”, according to NBC.

“Latinas are not working less hard. It comes down to the racism and sexism that they are facing in workplaces”, said Jasmine Tucker, director of research for the National Women's Law Center, which also published a report on the Latina wage gap.

Tucker said the center's analysis included education and job differences, but the gaps persist. “Nothing explains it away except racism and sexism”, she said.

At the height of the pandemic, the wage gap for Latin sons was about 49 cents for every dollar, mainly because Latin women were disproportionately driven out of the labor market in 2020. Low-income workers were the hardest hit.

“Latinas have started to return to the workforce and their employment rates are recovering, but many have returned to part-time jobs”, Ramírez said. The unemployment rate for Hispanic women 20 and older was 3.5% in November. But Latinas’ labor force participation rate remains below pre-pandemic levels, with nearly 1 in 5 Latinas unemployed for six months or more, and more than 1 in 8 Latinas working part time involuntarily, according to a separate report released by National Women's Law Center”, according to NBC.

According to the Justice for Migrant Women report, Earnings vary for Latinas depending on the countries they or their families come from. Median annual earnings were lowest for women of Honduran descent at $21,000 and highest for Puerto Rican women at $35,000 a year.

“Among Latinas specifically working full time, year-round, women of Honduran descent had the lowest earnings compared to non-Hispanic white men, at 44 cents for every dollar earned. Women of Argentinian and Spanish descent were the highest paid, at 82 cents for every dollar”, NBC reports based on the report.